Every Founder Is Building Agents. Nobody Is Building Trust.

51% of internet interactions today come from unidentified bots. Your AI agent is one of them — until it has a verifiable identity.

In this BuildBetter episode, Evin McMullen (co-founder & CEO of Billions Network, ex-Disco, ex-Privado ID, Consensys) walks through Know Your Agent (KYA) — the trust layer agentic commerce needs to actually work.

TLDR

Pull Quotes

“More than 51% of online and onchain interactions today come from unidentified, unaccountable bots.” — Evin McMullen, [00:00]
“Identity isn’t the thing. It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.” — Evin McMullen, [16:50]
“We cannot be making payments at scale if we don’t know who we are paying.” — Evin McMullen, [14:20]

Trust and Identity problem

There’s a number that should bother every founder building with AI agents right now.

51%.

More than half of all internet and onchain interactions today come from bots. Unidentified. Unaccountable. Anonymous by default.

Your agent is one of them.

It has no papers. No verifiable link back to you. When it talks to another agent, neither side can prove who — or what — they’re actually dealing with. That’s not a future problem. It’s the current state of the stack.

Evin McMullen has been working this problem for nearly a decade. First as a researcher adjacent to the Ethereum identity space. Then as the founder of Disco — the data backpack concept, the idea that your credentials should travel with you the same way your tokens do. Then through an acquisition by Privado ID (a ZK identity spinout from Polygon). And now as co-founder of Billions Network, which launched at ETH Denver 2025 and is already the third-largest ecosystem of onchain verified agents on earth.

Second only to Ethereum. By about 100 agents.

What is Know Your Agent (KYA)

How does my agent know it’s talking to your agent — and not a bad actor pretending to be you?

Right now, it doesn’t. There’s no standard answer. There’s no trust layer. And without one, agentic commerce — agents transacting, negotiating, paying on behalf of humans — can’t scale. You can’t pay someone if you don’t know who you’re paying.

Billions Network built KYA. Know Your Agent. It assigns a verifiable identity to an AI agent instance, cryptographically linked back to the human who deployed and controls it. Your agent becomes a function of you — provably.

Same ZK technology that lets you prove you’re over 18 without handing over your passport. Same infrastructure, now extended to the agents acting on your behalf.

Here’s the part most founders miss.

Billions didn’t ship a product and build a sales motion. They open-sourced the primitive.

Their ZK libraries are the most widely used on earth. Worldcoin uses them. The European Commission has run sandboxed proofs with them. They’re the #1 identity skill on OpenClaw — the agent capability repository that works like a GitHub for AI behavior.

The distribution logic is clean: make the infrastructure so foundational that builders can’t avoid it. Let the ecosystem pull you forward. Then build the application layer on top of an installed base you didn’t have to cold-call.

That’s not luck. That’s a deliberate choice to build a primitive instead of a product — and to open-source it so adoption compounds.

Billions roadmap is in three phases.

First: distribute the identity foundation. Get the data backpacks into the world. That’s now.

Second: introduce reputation. Layer in attributes — age, KYC, location, humanity, uniqueness — for both humans and their agents.

Third: the trust economy. Multi-step agentic workflows that actually move value based on verified reputation. Agentic commerce, at scale.

They’re in phase one. Phase three is where the real gravity is.

One more thing worth sitting with.

Evin made a point about the surveillance false dichotomy that I keep coming back to.

Governments and platforms keep framing online identity as binary: total anonymity or full disclosure. Hand over your passport, or stay anonymous. Pick one.

That’s wrong. And the people promoting that framing — Meta, certain legislators — know it’s wrong.

Zero-knowledge proofs are the third option. Prove you’re over 18. Don’t reveal your birthday. Prove you’re human. Don’t reveal your face. The technology exists. The open standards exist. The only thing missing is the will to use them — and infrastructure that makes them accessible without a PhD in cryptography.

That’s what the ZK query language Billions built is for. Drop-down menus. Pick your requirements. Generate the proof circuit. No cryptography background required.

The wall between “builders who understand ZK” and “builders who can use ZK” just got shorter.

Full podcast video with Evin McMullen

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